Aug. 23, 2013

Matt Schultz, 30, of Council Bluffs, is one of three Republicans seeking the Republican nomination for Iowa secretary of state.

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Last year, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz sounded an alarm with the claim that 3,582 non-citizens were unlawfully registered to vote in Iowa. The prospect was so grave, argued Schultz, that he needed emergency rules to remove from voter lists anyone whose citizenship was in question.

The problem was, it wasn’t true.

Schultz arrived at that number by comparing the names of non-citizen licensed drivers with names of people who voted in recent elections — hardly an exact science. A license is good for five years and nearly 11,500 Iowans became U.S. citizens in that time. So, with the November general election just weeks away and a risk of disenfranchising people authorized to vote, his effort was temporarily blocked by a Polk County judge.

A good thing, too, because a probe of those supposedly thousands of unauthorized voters has resulted in allegations against four non-citizens for voting. And that’s with 80 percent of counties in two voting cycles already examined, Assistant Division of Criminal Investigation Director Gerard Myers said.

The DCI referred 13 cases to county attorneys for prosecution. Charges were brought against 11 of those people; two others were said to be Canadians who had returned to Canada, said Chance McElhaney, Schultz’s spokesman. Two of the non-citizens who had voted said they thought that as legal permanent residents, they were allowed to vote in non-presidential elections (which is the case in some U.S. territories).

The rest of the 13 were former felons attempting to register or vote or, in one case, a mother who turned herself in for signing her daughter’s name on an absentee ballot at the daughter’s request, not knowing the daughter would also vote in Minnesota.

Three people pleaded guilty to lesser charges, four have coming trials, three cases were dropped, at least temporarily, because the DCI agent got called to serve in Afghanistan, and one other completed probation so the case was expunged. At most, three of the non-citizens had Latino surnames.

Schultz’s office denies this was much ado about nothing, since the investigation isn’t complete. But the evidence suggests not much more is likely to come of it.

Most of the county attorneys who received these cases said they hardly, if ever, hear allegations of non-citizen voting. “We haven’t prosecuted any of those,” said Marshall County Attorney Jennifer Miller. “We don’t have a lot of voter fraud,” said Warren County Attorney John Criswell, noting only one, which didn’t involve citizenship. Pottawattamie County Attorney Matt Wilber said the three cases that came to his office through this probe are the only ones he has ever dealt with. And Wright County Attorney Eric Simonson said in his 10 years there, he has had only two election cases — neither involving non-citizens.

But now, Schultz has succeeded in getting access to a second database he hopes will identify non-citizens. It’s the one the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to determine eligibility for public services. Schultz has been warned that that is a flawed way to verify citizenship since the office doesn’t have the birth certificates of people born in America, only papers on those who became U.S. citizens.

Still, Schultz plans to send letters to people whose names appear as ineligible for benefits, telling them they might not be citizens and might be illegally registered to vote. It gives them two weeks to prove their citizenship or face being blocked at the polls. Alternatively, they are told, they can cancel their voter registration, an option many might choose if they moved and don’t have their papers or come from countries where voters are harassed.

Schultz’s efforts come at a time when the U.S. attorney general is fighting back against voter ID laws in states like Texas that have made it harder for minorities and immigrants to vote. Colin Powell recently challenged North Carolina’s governor, a fellow Republican, for implementing a photo ID voting requirement, saying, “You can say what you like, but there is no voter fraud.”

Minorities and new immigrants tend to vote Democratic, and they could determine future elections. Schultz is a Republican, like Gov. Terry Branstad, who supports Schultz and signed an executive order forbidding former inmates from automatically having their voting rights restored.

Voting is the most basic responsibility and right of citizens. If there’s a voting problem, it’s not the minuscule number of people who do it without authorization. It’s the millions who don’t vote. To make matters worse, Schultz used $280,000 of Help America Vote money, intended to increase voting by underrepresented groups, to pay for his probe to disqualify voters. His website displays the number for a voter fraud hotline, where callers can press 1 to report “questionable activity pertaining to an election.“

There’s no hotline for the disenfranchised to get their voting rights back.